Persistence

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A friend asked a question of the general world over at one of the social media sites and since I had an an answer and since the answer required a lot of typing and since I know others will be interested in this particular story, I thought I'd answer it here.  I omit the question since its phrasing doesn't lead in to what I have to say here.  But you can figure out the gist of it.

What is the most important quality a writer can have?

Persistence.

Decades ago, when Gardner Dozois had only been editor of Asimov's for a couple of years, I dropped by his apartment one day and asked what was new.

He held up a manuscript and let it drop.  "There's a writer named Salmanezar [for obvious reasons, I'm using a pseudonym here] who keeps sending me crappy stories.  I reject one and send it back to him and by return mail, I got another one with a cheerful note saying he's amazed I didn't buy the last but here's another he's sure I'll take.  And it sucks too.  So I send it back and by return mail I get another story and another cheerful letter.  I can't get rid of the damned things!"

"That's interesting," I said.

Months went by, with the occasional reference to this energetic but unpublished writer.  I dropped in on Gardner and asked what was new.  "Remember that Salmanezar guy I keep telling you about?  Now, when he sends me a crappy story, he includes a little catalog for even more crappy stories, with an order form for me to check off which ones I'd like to look at.  Plus, the form stipulates that for every three stories I ask to look at, he'll throw in free a collaboration he's done with another guy who also can't write."

"Huh," I said.

Over time, "that Salmanezar guy" became "Salmanezar" and then "Sal."  Always, his letters were cheerful and upbeat.  Always, Gardner bounced the stories on first read.

Then one day I dropped by and asked what was new.

"I bought a story from Sal," Gardner said glumly.

"Really?!  Is it any good?"

Gardner shook his head like a great shaggy buffalo.  "I don't know," he said.  "I don't know if he's gotten better or if he just wore me down."

Well, I never read the rejected stories, so I don't know if Sal got better or not.  But I thought that story, and a lot of other stories that Gardner also bought from him were pretty good.  I'm glad that Sal didn't let rejection stop him.

So, yeah.  Persistence.


Oh, and . . .

But don't forget the part about cheerful and upbeat.  Nobody ever got in trouble for addressing an editor too positively.

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My Boskone Schedule

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Well, it's that time of year again:  Time to drive and drive and drive through the cold to spend a weekend in a hotel in Boston.  Either this is your idea of fun or it isn't -- and there's nothing I can do to shift you from one camp to the other.

Personally, I plan to have a blast at Boskone.  If you're there, be sure to say hi.

Here's my schedule:

Friday

Apocalypse How?

Friday 18:00 - 18:50, Burroughs (Westin)

A fair number of books and movies depict the end of the world. Now, it's time (relax — from a purely theoretical point of view) to see if they got it right or wrong. We’ll debunk some plausible but ultimately unconvincing scenarios of doom and lay out leading contenders for ways the world might really wind it all up.

Jeffrey A. Carver (moderator), Scott Lynch, Steven Popkes, Michael Swanwick

 Saturday

Reading: Michael Swanwick

Saturday 10:30 - 10:55, Griffin (Westin)

Autographing: Michael Swanwick

Saturday 13:00 - 13:50, Galleria-Autographing (Westin)

Kaffeeklatsch: Michael Swanwick

Saturday 14:00 - 14:50, Galleria-Kaffeeklatsch 2 (Westin)

Writing Great Openings

Saturday 15:00 - 15:50, Marina 2 (Westin)

What elements are necessary for a great opening, and is a great opening necessity for a great novel? Is it even more important to have a great opening in short fiction?

Paul Di Filippo (moderator), ML Brennan, Alexander Jablokov, Michael Swanwick, A.C.E. Bauer

The Alien

Saturday 16:00 - 16:50, Burroughs (Westin)

Let’s probe an alien for a change. What is it about aliens that captures our imagination? Does a good alien have to be different? Should it necessarily be fascinating … and maybe a bit frightening? Why? Which aliens have awakened our sense of wonder? They have been portrayed as benefactors, conquerors, victims, and even objects of desire: why? What parallels can we draw with human-to-human relationships? Perhaps we should be asking "what is it about humans?"

Walter H. Hunt (moderator), Andrea Hairston, Charles Stross, Michael Swanwick, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

 Sunday

Nifty Narrative Tricks

Sunday 11:00 - 11:50, Harbor I (Westin)

Some SF/F/H writers like to dazzle us with their out-of-the-ordinary storytelling. Let’s discuss such twisty techniques as insidious in-clues, unreliable narrators, unstated genders, shifty time-shifts, uncanny cameos, and more. What other clever things can be done with narrative to make the story more powerful and interesting?

Jo Walton (moderator), Steven Brust, Charles Stross, Michael Swanwick, Darrell Schweitzer

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A Memoir in the Form of Four Denim Jackets (Part 4)

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Ten years went by, and I was in need of a denim jacket more suited for the Nineties.  So I bought a new jacket and Marianne asked one of her right-wing colleagues at the Bureau of Laboratories to put a bullet hole in it.  (Not all gunners are conservative.  But it's remarkable how many conservatives own guns.)

Alas, when her co-worker returned the jacket, he'd used a .22 and the hole was barely noticeable.  So, after consultation with me, she brought it back to him and asked if he'd shoot it with one of his shotguns.

"You're planning to murder your husband and frame me for it, aren't you?" the colleague said.

But, as it turned out, Marianne wasn't, and the jacket looked great on me.  Particularly when I wore it with a red shirt.

When Sean was in Central High, he was desperate to be allowed to borrow the jacket and wear it to school.  But we would never let him do so.

It was the Nineties, after all, and school officials had no tolerance for anything whatsoever.


And if you're curious . . .

You can read Part 1 of the memoir here.

Part 2 here.

And Part 3 here.

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Lost Tales from Pegana

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I am not a collector of books.  Rather, I am an amasser of books.  Nevertheless, because I am friends with the proprietor, I have a small but rather fine collection of books and chapbooks from Pegana Press.

The latest item to arrive is Lost Tales Volume III by Lord Dunsany.  Dunsany was an important figure in the history of fantasy, the author of short, lapidarian fantasies that have been frequently imitated and never equalled.  He wrote a great deal more as well: plays, mainstream stories, the well-regarded "Jorkens" stories, and works that defy description (Dean Spanley, a short novel about a man who in a previous life was a spaniel recently and quite improbably was made into a movie).  But it is his fantasies that have proved to be his great contribution to English literature.

The Lost Tales series of chapbooks collects fantasies that Lord Dunsany published sixty to a hundred years ago but never collected.  They are being republished for the first time.  The pieces included in this volume are:

Jetsam
Sources of Information
A Go-Ahead Planet
A Tale of Roscommon
The Greek Slave
A Talk in the Dusk
Fuel

This is, alas, of necessity a pricey piece of goods.  The chapbook is, as the description on the Pegana Press page puts it:

Printed on Hahnemuhle Antique watermark laid paper. Soft grey heavy French paper cover, hand sewn with two color Irish linen thread.  Letterpress printed using Goudy Franciscan and Civilite types from The Dale Guild Foundry.  

So, yes, you want it.  The printing is beautiful and deep; it is impossible not to lightly run one's fingers across the page to feel the words caressing one's skin.  The bottom edge of the pages is deckled, the design is lovely, it's a pleasure to hold and to read.  And of course there's the pleasure of reading something very few living humans have ever seen.

If you're a serious collector, it will not surprise you that the collection -- handmade, hand-sewn, limited to an edition of 80 -- sells for $175 in chapbook format or $235 for the deluxe hardcover.  It is an item for intellectual sybarites.

You can find the Pegana Website here.  If you're a well-heeled bookman, you'll surely find something you need to buy.  If not, you can wander about the site, smiling wistfully and dreaming.


Above:  Pardon the slightly murky quality of my photo.  There are better pics on the Pegana site.

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A Memoir in the Form of Four Denim Jackets (Part 3)

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In the Eighties, I was both married and published.  So I needed a denim jacket more in keeping with my more dignified state.  Marianne took a new jacket and bleached the Milky Way across it.  Then she embroidered stars on the back in the pattern of the Northern Cross -- the constellation also known as Cygnus, the Swan.


The Guinness shoulder patch I had bought in Ireland in 1982, the first time I had ever been overseas.  Above one pocket are a cloisonne button of Fat Freddy's Cat, another for Solar Energy (I was working for the National Solar Heating and Cooling Information Center at the time), and a handmade "Cool Runnings" wooden button which I had bought in Jamaica.  Over the other pocket was a NASA patch -- I was a sponsor, not a participant. The black-and-white  button was for Philadelphia's Mythos Festival, a city-wide celebration of myth that Marianne and I both enjoyed the hell out of.  I wore it upside down to symbolize my intention to turn mythology on its head.

The braided string had significance, I know, but what it was I have long forgotten.

I used to call this jacket "my SFWA colors."

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Thane of Ursus Major

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George Martin may have his Iron Throne.

But I have the Chair of Bear!


Above:  Credit photo to Marianne C. Porter.

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Frankenstein Reborn

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If you've been paying attention to this blog -- and in this one instance, if in no other, you should -- you know that I think that local actor Josh Hitchens is a living cultural treasure.  Since 2011, he's been writing and putting on a series of one-man performances ranging of Dracula, Sleepy Hollow, Jeffrey Dahmer and other dark classics.

So when it was announced that he would be performing his own abridgment of Frankenstein at the Mütter Museum (one of the world's foremost collections of medical anomalies) for one night only, it seemed a match made in some dark heaven.  I bought tickets immediately, which was a good thing because the show, predictably, sold out quickly.

Museum Director Robert D. Hicks opened the evening with a nineteenth-century lecture (in period costume) on electricity and the human body.  Having heard many medical presentations in my time, I can attest that it was tone-perfect:  Informative, lucid, straightforward, modest -- and, as medical history has since proved, wrong in many respects.

Hitchens then took over, presenting a Frankenstein with the Hollywood's additions scraped off, one that began in the Arctic wastes, revealed the self-deluding nature of Victor's ambitions, and presented the Creature with horror and unalloyed sympathy.  I cannot be the only person to leave the evening determined to reread Mary Shelley's masterpiece as soon as possible.

Josh Hitchens' performance was, as always, absolutely compelling.  By limiting the audience to a small enough number that nobody was ever peering over anybody else's shoulder, he was able to connect more viscerally with us all.  We were all caught in the magnetic field of his performance, and it was almost impossible to look away.  There in the liminal space where acting and storytelling overlap something special occurs. It's an experience unlike any other.

Frankenstein was performed in a number of rooms within the Mütter, making the museum itself almost a second performer.  Victor Frankenstein becomes more monstrous when he is explaining his ambitions while standing alongside a display case containing the skeleton of Siamese twins.  His creation seems far more plausible presented in the context of Nineteenth Century medicine.

It was a wonderfully gothic evening.  Let's hope the Mütter Museum sponsors it again someday.  If it does, I'll be sure to let you know.

Above (text): Before you call me on an error, allow me to stipulate that I consider Josh Hitchen's Jeffrey Dahmer something of an instant classic.  You would too, had you seen it.

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